The short answer is, yes you do! Natural disasters do occur, like the wildfires we have had over the last seven years, but overall they are relatively rare. You may think you can wait another year to address your disaster recovery plan for backup data, but the reality is that you need to address the 'how' as well as the 'when.'
According to Strategic Research Corp., a Santa Barbara-based research firm, most disaster-recovery and business-continuity events are not full-blown natural disasters. Hardware failure accounts for 44 percent of business downtime. Human error accounts for another 32 percent of disruptions.
That's 76 percent of a company's potential business discontinuity that is not a natural occurrence. Only 3 percent is from natural causes. Given those statistics, experts advise preparedness above all else.
More than 90 percent of businesses that go down for more than 10 days will file for bankruptcy.
But there is good news. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg to get your company's data protected. With the advent of faster, less costly hard drives, you can create a reliable, redundant backup-recovery solution. This can be done with network attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), or disk arrays with RAID 1 or 5 capabilities.
What about tape as a backup medium? I know the tape manufacturers will disagree with me but I suggest if you are currently using tape to move to disk, and if you are thinking about going to tape, don't. Tape is a slow medium compared to disk and if your network has limited bandwidth it can be slow during a limited backup window.
The other, more important issue is that tape can have up to 20 percent data loss if not properly checked. Lastly, if you need to recover your data you have to find the right tape, load it, and retrieve the file. This can take valuable time, especially if they are located offsite.
Another popular strategy is to have your data backed up to a cloud service, in which your backups are sent over a WAN to datacenters located in another city, state, or even country. In the event you do have a disaster, you will be able to your recover your core data and get back online.
When you have your backup-recovery plan in place, you need to test the strategy every six months to see how fast your company can get back up and running. As your company grows, adjust your strategy
accordingly.
For more information, contact Tom Wood at 760-729-1580.